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Monday, January 3, 2011

What better way to start the month than with the first thing I ever designed! I've come a looooong way since this design, but surprisingly I think that the final version of the logo is one of my best creations. Luckily I've always been proud of this design which is generally not the case when I complete a project. Usually I go through a period where I hate the work first, but this was love at first site.

Let's check out the evolution of the frying pan logo:

From the moment I started thinking of a KochLab logo, I knew I wanted to do a frying pan design. It had to be cooking themed because everyone mispronounces Koch (coch, cock, coke, etc) and I thought having a cooking theme would help that out. Surprisingly, to this day no one gets the connection and they STILL mispronounce Koch.

Anyways, at this time I knew next to nothing about Illustrator and so making this logo took me a long time. Here is my first attempt at the logo:

The frying pan, burner, and DNA bacon (which is made from the OWW logo) remain constant throughout. In this attempt I made a custom font which I was fond of at the time, but now looks absolutely grotesque. Although I am quite impressed with my abilities with the pen tool which is very daunting for a first time user. Also notice the position of the optical trap. In this case it makes the K. I remember not being able to accomplish exactly what I wanted to at the time and thus made a change:

Here is attempt two (actually it was probably attempt 30, but all those remakes were cut from the process a long time ago). I used the same frying pan put moved the trap so that the microsphere makes the "O" which I think was the right adjustment. The font and company name are still the same design to this day, but for some reason I had to redesign the frying pan:

I think the reason was that I didn't save the file properly or that I just couldn't work with the previous rendition and so I just decided to try again. I also decided to go with a different burner which I think is a little more appropriate. Finally while the frying pan is nearly identical I added a bolder stroke to give it a little extra pop.